Pulitzer winner doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee on Monday said a study on how coronavirus behaves within an individual to understand how to contain it is as important as the study of Covid-19 infection spread across people and geographies.

It's not enough to study the spread of Covid-19 infection across people and geographies, Mukherjee told CNBC-TV18.

He said it is equally important to study how the virus behaves within an individual to understand how it could be contained.

Mukherjee said some of the questions that need immediate study include -- how long can the virus survive within a person? How does its count rise and fall? How infectious is a person at various stages of the infection?

The physician, biologist, oncologist, and author said that answers to such questions will help determine the most effective medical and social response to control the spread of the pandemic.

Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University, said, “The anxiety is still that we are still in New York with all the infrastructure that we have we are still struggling to contain the virus. There is a very important feature of this virus called the R0 or the R- naught that refers to the number of people that one person who is infected can infect."

"In case of Covid without any protection, if we did nothing that umber is around 2- 2.3 or something like that that is a huge number because it means that every person infects about 2-3 people and it goes exponentially. The main job that we have right now is to decrease that number to one and below one. The way to do that is social distancing, isolation, quarantine and I strongly suspect that the public should be wearing masks as well.”

Mukherjee on wearing masks

He said, “We underestimated the number of asymptomatic people who are carrying the virus, they have no symptoms but they are carrying the virus and they are sharing the virus."

Mukherjee on why N95 mask

"We should handle this on two fronts, on the medical front the first priority is to get the medical people the kind of mask that they need, these are so called N95 mask, they filter out virus and respiratory droplets. Also given the number of asymptomatic people I do think that because the virus is carried in the respiratory droplets it is good idea to wear simple cotton mask.”

Mukherjee on hydroxycholoroquine as a prophylactic

When asked about evidence of hydroxycholoroquine as a prophylactic, he said, “The evidence for hydroxycholoroquine is extremely limited and very poor. The trails that have been conducted on hydroxycholoroquine thus far are extraordinarily limited and extraordinarily poor in quality. I don’t believe that it should be used as a drug or as a prophylactic drug at this time until the trials are done.”

He further added, “Until we have treatment the only thing we can do is to protect the medical workers, let them do their job, provide them with enough ventilators so that if people need to be ventilated they can and finally social distancing, and hand hygiene is absolutely critical, do not leave your home if you can and if you have to then wear a mask that I suggested."

This is not a joke, young people die from coronavirus overnight, he added.

"So, this is not to be treated as a sort of holiday from history, this is a moment of history and it is a moment that will change the phase of how we think about pandemics and human biology for the rest of the time to come. So I would strongly urge people to take this with extreme seriousness.”